A Comparative Study Of The Pragmatic Function Of Demonstratives This, That In English And (?), (?) In Mongolian

Deixis is one of the universal phenomena in human languages that have been much studied in pragmatics. Many studies are accomplished to compare deictic expressions in English and many other languages. However, little has been done on the comparison of Mongolian demonstratives and English demonstratives. The most typical and complicated deictic expressions in English and Mongolian languages are demonstrative pronouns this/that and (?)/(?). This thesis makes a preliminary comparative study on the demonstrative pronouns, mainly consisting of the proximal demonstrative pronouns this/(?) and distal demonstrative pronouns that/(?) in English and Mongolian respectively.Based on the previous studies on demonstratives and the theories of Deixis and Reference, this thesis attempts to investigate the tendentious rules of gestural and symbolic use of this/(?) and that/(?) in situational context and anaphora and cataphora use in linguistic context. The data for this thesis is drawn from the online Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Mongolian Modern Language Corpus (MMLC). The final goal is to seek common ground while maintaining difference by analyzing their frequencies of occurrence in each corpus and to discuss their different pragmatic functions.The thesis has found some similarities and differences in demonstrative usage in these two language systems through comprehensive analysis. The major findings are as follows:Firstly, the frequencies of demonstratives this/that and (?)/(?) in two languages display the opposite features.Secondly, exophoric function of the two sets of demonstratives are similar. Both of the demonstratives in English and Mongolian have gestural and symbolic use.Thirdly, demonstratives in two languages have many differences in endophoric function.